Putin Activist Wants Group Helping Diabetics in Saratov Declared a Foreign Agent

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 29 – A pro-Putin activist in Saratov says that he considers it his “civic duty” to call on officials to label a group that has helped those suffering from diabetes there for more than 30 years “a foreign agent” because he suspects it is receiving subsidies from foreign drug companies (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/12/27/75056-poschital-grazhdanskim-dolgom-podat-signal).

            Many of those who have benefited from the group’s services have expressed outrage and the activist says that he is willing to withdraw his suit, although he has taken down the VKontakte post where he said that. But the wheels of the Russian justice system have begun to move and the group will be the subject of a hearing on January 15. 

            Larisa Saygina, the new president of the Saratov Regional Organization of Those Suffering from Diabetes, tells Radio Liberty that the problems her group now faces arose not from this latest action – she dismisses the activist as a puppet controlled by others – but earlier this year (svoboda.org/a/28944324.html).

            Officials don’t like the fact that the group complains too often about insulin shortages and other problems and see this action as a way of shutting the group up, Saygina says; but she adds that they won’t succeed because while the group has no money, it does have active supporters among the many in Saratov whose suffering is alleviated only by the actions of her organization.

            The local authorities have driven them out of the rooms at the local polyclinic where they had received patients and given them advice, and now the group may be pushed into the streets because officials are unwilling to sign a rental agreement with them. At present, the group doesn’t even have enough money to pay for local telephone calls.

            It has received help in the past from “the Russian representatives of foreign pharmacological companies” which have factories in Russia, some for more than 50 years.  “All the medicines [the group uses] are produced at these factories and not brought in from abroad,” Saygina points out.

            She also notes that the Russian health ministry currently uses the same companies her group does and no one seems to have any problems with that. If the group is declared a foreign agent, it will appeal; and those whom it has helped say they will not only testify on behalf of the group but go into the streets to protest if the group needs them to do so.

Kalmyks Now Copy Ingushes in Demanding Apologies from Moscow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 29 – One of Moscow’s biggest fears is now coming true: some non-Russians are copying what other non-Russians are demanding and not just within broader ethnic communities like those based on Islam or Finno-Ugric languages but far more broadly, a development that if it grows could spell real trouble for the central government.

            Earlier this month, Ingush activists and officials demanded that a Moscow television channel apologize for its snide and degrading remarks about members of their nationality, a demand that brought both the required apology and objections by Russians who argued that no apology was necessary.

            But now, the Kalmyks, a Buddhist people in the North Caucasus, have adopted the same strategy with regard to a TNT program that in their view insulted Buddha and hence their people. And the Kavkaz Uzel portal says that this copying of the Ingush experience is “a successful and positive” thing (kavkaz-uzel.eu/blogs/83772/posts/31234).

            One must not insult either Buddha or the Koran, the site says; and if Christians nonetheless want to laugh about caricatures of Christ in a Parisian journal, “that is their affair but it doesn’t give them the right to treat other ‘other’ prophets in the same way.” Chukchis would be equally right to complain about jokes at their expense.

            According to Kavkaz Uzel, “federalism and the poly-ethnic quality of the state a priori presupposes diversity and mutual respect of all to all and not the copying of everything in bad taste that is done in the capital.”  If Moscow does not understand this now, then it must be forced to understand.

            What is equally interesting in this development is that it represents an unintended consequence of the Russian law prohibiting anything that insults the feelings of believers, a law that was pushed by an intended to protect Russian Orthodox Christians but one that is now being used by others, in this case the Buddhist Kalmyks, to protect themselves. 

For the Third Time since 1999, a Putin Campaign is Marked by a Terrorist Incident

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 29 – For the third time during a Putin election campaign – the first was in 1999 and the second in 2004 – there has been a terrorist act in Russia, this time in St. Petersburg; and Vladimir Putin has responded by positioning himself as the defender of the nation and demanding the security forces take no prisoners.

            Two things are striking about the Petersburg action. On the one hand, it comes on the heels of Putin’s repeated and much-ballyhooed insistence that he has defeated the Islamic State in Syria and suppressed anti-Moscow militants in the North Caucasus.  And on the other, it is only the second terrorist attack in Russia this past year.

            And that conjunction has led some to recall the way in which Putin personally was involved in the 1999 bombings and to discuss the ways in which counter-terrorist has always been a strong suit for the Kremlin leader and may prove to be again (caucasustimes.com/ru/zhizni-620-chelovek-unesli-tri-prezidentskie-kompanii-v-rossii/ and echo.msk.ru/blog/oreh/2119310-echo/).

            Perhaps the most thoughtful discussion of the relationship between this most recent terrorist act and Putin’s re-election effort has been offered by Moscow commentator Igor Yakovenko in Yezhednevny zhurnal (ej.ru/?a=note&id=31972) who points out that the authorities didn’t view the Petersburg act as terrorism but Putin demanded that they do so.

            Putin’s demand that the authorities “’take no prisoners’” was clearly intended to please his “core electorate” because it “corresponds to the macho image with which he ran in the first presidential campaign in 2000.”  But it has other values for the Kremlin leader as well, the commentator says.

            A dead terrorist is useful because it shows the state can defeat him, but he or she is also useful in that a dead terrorist can’t talk and challenge the official version of events, thus allowing the authorities to define the situation as they like without regard to the facts of the case in order to promote Putin’s election.

            Indeed, for purposes of the campaign, any information from prisoners “would only interfere,” Yakovenko says, because Putin’s chief opponent is not the terrorists but “his own population.”  He needs the freedom to lie and killing those involved in such actions is the best way to secure that benefit.

            After the April 2017 attack in the Petersburg metro, many people speculated on who might have been responsible and even asked whether it might have been “a provocation organized by the authorities themselves” -- just as many did in the fall of 1999 after the apartment bombings were blamed on the Chechens.

            This week, no one has offered any evidence that the authorities were involved, “but nonetheless such a hypothesis has spread through the social networks.” Those who are doing so are not obsessed with conspiracies but rather reflecting their experience with Putin and his KGB comrades.

            “When a terrorist act happens in London, only a seriously ill individual could accuse Teresa May or Elizabeth II in its organization, and even the harshest opponents of Macron or Merkel would accuse them of organizing terrorist actions.” They might be accused of ineffectiveness or incompetence but not or being behind them.

            In Putin’s case, the situation is different, Yakovenko says. His reputation “consists of two components – his own actions and the history of that organization he is so proud to have been part of. And thanks to this ‘composite’ reputation … Putin will be among the first suspects of any major crime committed on the planet.”